The Journal of Public and International Affairs · Pavia (Italy) and visiting lecturer in International Relations and Tourism at the University of Italian Switzerland, in Lugano (Switzerland)

Book Reviews in this Issue $13.00Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government ROBERT ERIKSON p. 549

Charles S. Bullock III, Ronald Keith Gaddie, and Justin J. Wert, The Rise and Fall of the Voting Rights Act MARGARET M. GROARKE p. 550

Daniel Béland, Philip Rocco, and Alex Waddan, Obamacare Wars: Federalism, State Politics, and the Affordable Care Act MICHAEL K. GUSMANO p. 551

Hal Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War OrderTOM LONG p. 553

Kate Baldwin, The Paradox of Traditional Chiefs in Democratic Africa MICHAEL G. SCHATZBERG p. 555

John P. Burke, Presidential Power: Theories and Dilemmas DIANE J. HEITH p. 556

Melanye T. Price, The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race MICHAEL JAVEN FORTNER p. 558

Susan Turner Haynes, Chinese Nuclear Proliferation: How Global Politics Is Transforming China’s Weapons Buildup and Modernization DAVID BACHMAN p. 559

Sumit Ganguly, Deadly Impasse: Indo-Pakistani Relations at the Dawn of a New Century PAUL KAPUR p. 561

Donald F. Kettl, Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America’s Lost Commitment to Competence BRYAN D. JONES p. 562

Michael F. Oppenheimer, Pivotal Countries, Alternate Futures: Using Scenarios to Manage American Strategy MARCUS HOLMES p. 564

Barak Mendelsohn, The al-Qaeda Franchise: The Expansion of al-Qaeda and Its Consequences AUSTIN LONG p. 565

Kjell Engelbrekt, High-Table Diplomacy: The Reshaping of International Security InstitutionsDAVID A. DEESE p. 567

Marwan M. Kraidy, The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World WILLIAM LAFI YOUMANS p. 569

Simon Reid-Henry, The Political Origins of Inequality: Why a More Equal World Is Better for Us AllDANIEL P. HAWES p. 570

James W. Endersby and William T. Horner, Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation JEFFREY L. LITTLEJOHN p. 572

Vincent Pouliot, International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral DiplomacyPATRICK THADDEUS JACKSON p. 573

Darren Kew, Civil Society, Confl ict Resolution, and Democracy in Nigeria A. CARL LEVAN p. 575

Omar G. Encarnación, Out in the Periphery: Latin America’s Gay Rights Revolution JORDI DÍEZ p. 577

Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Continental Drift: Britain and Europe from the End of Empire to the Rise of Euroscepticism GEORGE ROSS p. 578

Doris Marie Provine, Monica W. Varsanyi, Paul G. Lewis, and Soctt H. Decker, Policing Immigrants: Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines KRISTEN HILL MAHER p. 580

Sangay K. Mishra, Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans NATALIE MASUOKA p. 581

Timothy P.R. Weaver, Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom RACHEL MELTZER p. 583

Johannes Kadura, The War after the War: The Struggle for Credibility During America’s Exit from Vietnam SIMON TONER p. 584

Melissa Deckman, Tea Party Women: Mama Grizzlies, Grassroots Leaders, and the Changing Face of the American Right CHRISTOPHER C. TOWLER p. 586

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The Journal of Public and International Affairs

The Varieties of Collective Financial Statecraft: The BRICS and ChinaSAORI N. KATADA, CYNTHIA ROBERTS, AND LESLIE ELLIOTT ARMIJO

Chinese Thinking on the South China Sea and the Future of Regional Security FENG ZHANG

“Whither We Are Tending”: Interrogating the Retrenchment Narrative in U.S. Environmental PolicyDAVID J. SOUSA AND CHRISTOPHER MCGRORY KLYZA

Making America Grate Again: The “Italianization” of American Politics and the Future of Transatlantic Relations in the Era of Donald J. TrumpMARCO CLEMENTI, DAVID G. HAGLUND, AND ANDREA LOCATELLI

The Racial Gap in Wait Times: Why Minority Precincts Are Underserved by Local Election Offi cialsSTEPHEN PETTIGREW

Book Reviews

Making America Grate Again: The“Italianization” of American Politicsand the Future of TransatlanticRelations in the Era of Donald J.Trump

MARCO CLEMENTIDAVID G. HAGLUNDANDREA LOCATELLI

For decades theRepublican Party has embracedAmerica’s open, future-oriented nationalism. But when younominate a Silvio Berlusconi you give up a piece of that.1

LATE ON THE NIGHT of Tuesday, 8 November 2016, when pundits onAmerica’s many television networks were suddenly beginning to graspthat the all-but-guaranteed election of Hillary Clinton as the 45thpresident of the United States was not going to occur, a member ofthe team covering the day’s events for PBS offered what, in our view, was

MARCO CLEMENTI is an associate professor of International Relations at the University ofPavia (Italy) and visiting lecturer in International Relations and Tourism at the University ofItalian Switzerland, in Lugano (Switzerland). DAVID G. HAGLUND is professor of politicalstudies at Queen’s University in Kingston (Ontario). ANDREA LOCATELLI is an assistantprofessor of International Relations at the Catholic University in Milan (Italy).

1David Brooks, commenting on the nomination of Donald J. Trump as Republican candidate for president,in “Democrats Win the Summer,” New York Times, 29 July 2016.

POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY | Volume 132 Number 3 2017 | www.psqonline.org# 2017 Academy of Political Science DOI: 10.1002/polq.12655 495

a most intriguing clue for comprehending what had happened: theAmerican voters, remarked Jeff Greenfield, had just elected SilvioBerlusconi.2 Now, this was hardly the first time that the Republicancandidate had been compared with an Italian political figure, nor wouldit be the last. Our purpose in this article is to reflect systematically uponthis “Italianization” of American domestic politics, so curiously ondisplay during the most recent campaign—for it is not every day, toput it mildly, that one finds such frequent appeal being made to Italian“objective correlatives” in a bid to explicate American ones.

As interesting, on the face of things, as this might be to Italianscholars and their readers, we posit our Italianization thesis becauseit speaks to two important questions surrounding the future ofAmerican domestic and foreign policies. The first question is this:which of the two leading Italian analogies so often bruited about duringthe election campaign, Benito Mussolini or Silvio Berlusconi, makes themost sense (to the extent that either makes any sense), and with whatimplications for American domestic politics? The second question is aderivative one and concerns the potential “lesson” that our Italiantutorial might have for the quality of America’s future relations withits transatlantic allies.

Of course, it was not just with Italian political figures that Donald J.Trump was being compared throughout the long and, at times, some-what surreal campaign of 2016.3 At various moments, one could hear orread accounts that Trump resembled no one so much as he did any of agamut of former and current personages, usually assembled from arogues’ gallery, given that few, if any, of the analogy wielders couldbe deemed to be partisans of the Republican nominee and, therefore,likely to want to suggest admirable analogues. Comparisons extendedall the way from the ridiculous (Adolf Hitler) to the absurd (NigelFarage),4 with a few observers even invoking midrange nonentitiessuch as Hugo Ch�avez. Sometimes, however, purely homegrown com-parisons seemed to be the only ones that counted, for instance, Trump

2Accessed at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/pressrelease/pbs-newshour-announces-election-night-2016-special-coverage-plans/, 19 May 2017.3For the flavor of that electoral season, see Maureen Dowd, The Year of Voting Dangerously: TheDerangement of American Politics (New York: Twelve, 2016).4In the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote in June 2016, the lead editorial published in Canada’snational newspaper somewhat bizarrely interpreted the British tally as a victory for Donald Trump. “Whoever imagined,” harrumphed the editorialist(s), in drawing a parallel with Nigel Farage, “that Britain—rational, modern, sophisticated Britain—would turn out to be the wind beneath Mr. Trump’s wings?” See“Bloody Old England,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 25 June 2016.

496 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

as Huey Long, or as Father Charles Coughlin, or as Joseph McCarthy—and even, to some rare analogists not spooked by the prospect of aTrump presidency, as Andrew Jackson.5 One commentator, New YorkTimes columnist Roger Cohen, insisted that when all was said anddone, Trump had to be considered sui generis, beyond the range ofcommensurability with political figures from other places or othertimes, because he was “only and absolutely of America” in the earlytwenty-first century. Yet in so declaring, even Cohen could not resist theItalian tutorial, detecting as he did very disturbing similarities betweenTrump and Mussolini.6

Nor was Cohen alone in highlighting Il Duce as a potentially usefultrope for understanding the stakes of the American election. Manyobservers will tell you that there is a likelihood of fascism coming toAmerica, for some of the very same reasons that it arrived in Italyfollowing the First World War.7 This fear (or hope, if you are a followerof America’s “alt-right”) seems rather far-fetched to us, for a variety ofreasons upon which we elaborate in the following section. Nevertheless,we do consider there to be merit—possibly even a bit of perverse psychiccomfort—to be had from that other Italian symbol, Berlusconi. MichaelWalzer once so elegantly wrote, of symbols, that they “tell us more thanwe can easily repeat.”8 Indeed, they do; our purpose in these pages is toreflect upon the claim made by quite a few commentators that Trump isBerlusconi and to ask what the implications of such a pairing might be.9

Again, the implications are of two sorts—those that will find their great-est salience in the domestic political arena in the United States and thosewhose importance will bear most heavily upon the quality of America’stransatlantic relationships.

5Not surprisingly, Trump supporters such as Rudolph Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Stephen Bannon havefound much to commend in the Trump-as-Jackson analogy; see Jonah Engel Bromwich, “The WildInauguration of Andrew Jackson, the Original American Populist,” New York Times, 21 January 2017.6Roger Cohen, “Trump’s Il Duce Routine,” New York Times, 1 March 2016.7See Fedja Buric, “Trump’s Not Hitler, He’s Mussolini: How GOP Anti-Intellectualism Created a ModernFascist Movement in America,” Salon, 11 March 2016, accessed at http://www.salon.com/2016/03/11/trumps_not_hitler_hes_mussolini, 19 May 2017; Peter Baker, “Rise of Donald Trump Tracks GrowingDebate over Global Fascism,”New York Times, 29May 2016; and Justin E.H. Smith, “No, He’s Not Hitler:And Yet. . .,” International New York Times, 8 June 2016, 8.8Michael Walzer, “On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought,” Political Science Quarterly 82(June 1967): 191–204, at 196.9James B. Stewart, “Berlusconi a Precedent for Trump,”New York Times, 2December 2016; “Battle Lines,”The Economist, 5 March 2016; and Valentina Pasquali, “Americans, Brace Yourselves for the BungaBunga,” Foreign Policy, 2 March 2016, accessed at http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/02/americans-brace-yourselves-for-the-bunga-bunga-berlusconi-donald-trump/, 19 May 2017.

MAKING AMERICA GRATE AGAIN | 497

Our argument is developed in several stages. Immediately following, weshowwhy it is that the comparisons toMussolini really do constitute such abig analytical stretch—far too big for us to endorse. After that, our nextsection concentrates on the Italian comparison that we think is of greaterrelevance, the onewith Berlusconi. Our penultimate section is comparativein a different way, for in it we look “diachronically” at two eras in the recentrecord of U.S. transatlantic diplomacy, the Bill Clinton/George W. Bushyears and the present.We pose the question of whether Donald Trump canbe counted upon to “make America grate again” with the allies, and if so,why, and how the Berlusconi trope could be of relevance to this discussion.Our conclusion provides our answers to these questions.

NOT ANOTHER “MAN OF PROVIDENCE”: THE LIMITS OF THE

TRUMP-MUSSOLINI ANALOGYFor anyone familiar with BenitoMussolini’s image and peculiar manner ofgesturing, Donald Trump does present striking similarities. For starters,his facial expressions in public speeches, in particular the way he juts outthe jaw, resemble those of Il Duce, at times (for example, during the seconddebate with Hillary Clinton on 9 October 2016) uncannily so. Othercommon characteristics, assiduously assembled by Trump’s many critics,include the following: shared aphorisms, a demonstrable “alpha-male”attitude, and frequent references to violence.10 In a nutshell, or so theargument went during the campaign, a Trump victory in Novemberwould expose America’s political system to the menace of an authoritariansystem reproducing some of the most nefarious traits of the Italian systembetween the late 1920s and 1945.11

Clearly, there aremanywho reject theMussolini analogy, and they do sonot because they think Trump instead is really Hitler but because they find

10An example is the apothegm about it being “better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,” aquote widely attributed toMussolini, which Trump happily retweeted to his followers on 28 February 2016.“Machismo” is both explicit (as when Trump alluded to the size of his own genitals or grabbing those ofwomen) and implicit, particularly through references to women, the disabled, and anyone who might belabeled a “loser.” See Nancy LeTourneau, “Donald Trump’s Narcissistic Delusion,” Washington Monthly,28 April 2016, accessed at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2016_04/donald_trumps_narcissistic_del060402.php, 19 May 2017. Violence has been suggested with differingdegrees of intensity against protesters needing a punch in the face, terrorists deserving to be tortured, andillegal immigrants requiring forceful deportation, along with their families. See, amongmany others raisingthis point, Jonathan Freedland, “Welcome to the Age of Trump,” The Guardian, 19 May 2016.11So far, prominent proponents of the Mussolini analogy include pundits such as Fedja Buric and RobertKagan, as well as journalists such as Peter Baker, Roger Cohen, and AdamGopnik. See Buric, “Trump’s NotHitler, He’s Mussolini”; Robert Kagan, “This Is How Fascism Comes to America,” Washington Post,18 May 2016; Baker, “Rise of Donald Trump”; Cohen, “Trump’s Il Duce Routine”; and Adam Gopnik,“Going There with Donald Trump,” The New Yorker, 11 May 2016.


the comparison with Il Duce more misleading than enlightening.12 Theproblem with analogies is well known: they often prevent us from betterunderstanding current events because they can lead us to miss seeing whatis novel in our quest to glimpse something familiar.13 That said, we intendto resort to analogy, and in so doing we employ this logical resourcein accordance with the advice tendered by Jeffrey Herf, as a means of“sketch[ing] out the domains inwhich a comparisonmightmake sense.”14

We think that there are two such domains that have been neglected by theTrump-as-Mussolini camp: the socioeconomic context surroundingTrump/Mussolini’s fortunes and the role of institutional actors in support-ing/hampering the rise of Trump/fascism. Neither sustains the case thatTrump resembles Mussolini, save in the most superficial sense.

In short, we are not primarily interested here in the rhetorical andcommunicative aspects that have characterized Trump’s rise up to now;these we take to be epiphenomenal. Nor are we concerned with thenationalistic stamp apparent in both leaders’ rhetoric—an “agenda item”

that Trump indisputably shares with the Italian dictator. Instead, ourcritique of the Trump-Mussolini analogy is that its exclusive focus onthe person (and his acts) misses one all-important consideration, neglect-ing as it does the critical role played by contextual factors. It is thelatter that could (or would) eventually determine whether and how thetowheaded tycoon might follow in the footsteps of the Italian dictator.A brief look at the origins of fascism—or better, at the way through whichMussolini came to power—suffices to highlight the obvious, namely, that2017 America is not, and never can be, 1922 Italy. And this, we think,makes all the difference in the world.15

12For more nuanced views on the Trump-Mussolini analogy, see Isaac Chotiner, “Is Donald Trump aFascist? Yes and No,” Slate, 10 February 2016, accessed at http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/02/, 19 May 2017; and Holger Stark, “An Exhausted Democracy:Donald Trump and the New American Nationalism,” Der Spiegel, 17 May 2016, accessed at http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/essay-donald-trump-and-the-new-american-nationalism-a-1092548.html, 13 June 2017; and Sheri Berman, “Donald Trump Isn’t a Fascist”, Vox, 3 January 2017, accessed athttp://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/3/14154300/fascist-populist-trump-democracy, 19 May 2017.13On the pitfalls of analogical reasoning, see Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, DienBien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); andYaacov Y.I. Vertzberger, TheWorld in TheirMinds: Information Processing, Cognition, and Perception inForeign Policy Decisionmaking (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).14Jeffrey Herf, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?,” The American Interest, 7 March 2016, accessed at http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/03/07/is-donald-trump-a-fascist/, 19 May 2017. Unlike our own,Herf’s domains of choice included “attitudes toward democracy, political violence, press freedoms, and therole of the state within society and culture.”15For a different view, one that insists “[i]t takes willful blindness not to see the parallels between the rise offascism and our current political nightmare,” cf. Paul Krugman, “How Republics End,” New York Times,19 December 2016.


Accordingly, our initial domain of comparison is provided by the socio-economic context, which can, in turn, be broken down into two parts. Thefirst relates to the main fractures dividing American and Italian societies,today and in the past. The second concerns the nature of America’s current(purported) crisis when it is contrasted with the catastrophic state ofthe Italian economy after the First World War. We start with societalfractures. Italy in the first decades of the twentieth century was undergoinga painful process of modernization, marked by the mushrooming ofits industrial sector and the consequent expansion of its working class.However, agriculture remained the primary source of wealth for themajority of the population and the main generator of employment. As aresult, two principal cleavages ran through Italian society. The first ofthese, situated almost exclusively in Italy’s big (and northern) cities, wasbetween the entrepreneurial and the working class. The second, spread outin rural areas all over the country, was between large landowners andfarmers.16 Initially a heterogeneous gathering of anarchists, revolutionaryunionists, student associations, and cultural vanguards, fascism quicklychanged colors and ended up supporting rather than opposing thewealthiest entrepreneurial families in the cities, along with the aristocraticlandowners. Through the systematic employment of violence, fascistsquads suffocated both the peasantry’s demands for land and blue-collarlabor’s quest for better working conditions.17

No doubt, some of Trump’s earliest moves after his election do suggestanalogies with the Italian dictator. In particular, just as Mussolini provedeager to evolve his base of support from what had been a geographicallyand socially limited fraction of Italy’s public opinion to larger swathes ofthe population, so Trump, too, quickly sought to enlarge his own basefrom the discontented “white guys” of the Rust Belt and grumpy outlierselsewhere in the country to include a coterie of reasonably cossetted WallStreet elites against whom he had campaigned so fervently just a shortwhile before.18 Both leaders could legitimately be said to have practicedthe politics of “bait and switch,” but there is a major difference betweenthe results they obtained. It has to be said thatMussolini showed himself to

16Paul Corner, “State and Society, 1901–1922,” in Adrian Lyttlelton, ed., Liberal and Fascist Italy:1900–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 37–43.17Giulia Albanese and Roberta Pergher, eds., In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence, andAgency in Mussolini’s Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), chaps. 1 and 2.18Maureen Dowd, “Trump, Working-Class Zero,” New York Times, 19 March 2017. See also Zaid Jilani,“Donald Trump’s Economic Policy Team Is Stackedwith Lobbyists and Conflicts of Interest,”The Intercept,28 February 2017, accessed at https://theintercept.com/2017/02/28/donald-trumps-economic-policy-team-is-stacked-with-lobbyists-and-conflicts-of-interest/, 19 May 2017.


be much more capable, at least for a time, in generating favorable levels ofpublic support than Trump has been. Nor did the early Mussolini yearsfeature anything like the degree of administrativemishap and chaos that sofar has attended the Trump administration, which as we write this has justsuffered the huge indignity of being unable to get enshrined into legislationwhat has been for seven years the signature item on the Republicans’ wishlist of reforms, namely, the repeal of “Obamacare”—and this notwithstandingthat the Trump presidency presumably could avail itself of the luxury ofhaving a Republican Congress in both houses (what some refer to, notnecessarily in jest, as “unified government”).19 If Trump is indeed Mussoliniand thus, by extension, a fascist, as his most hyperbolic critics insist, he isso in a most Pickwickian manner.

To say again, the reason for the inapplicability of the Mussolini analogyhas everything to do with context. America is hardly a problem-free place(where is such a place?), but according to many analysts, its politicaldilemma of the moment is represented by the increasing resentment ofan impoverished (and white) middle class, squeezed, on the one hand, bythe disproportionate wealth of the richest 10 percent of the population and,on the other, by the improving conditions of lower classes (representedmost vividly by Hispanics and African Americans).20 On top of this, thecountry’s society and its institutions have become more liberal in the past20 or so years, thus challenging the status of traditionalist and conservativevoters, increasing their sense of relative deprivation.21 It is this portion ofthe population—the so-called angry white man (and also woman)—thatfound Trump’s message so appealing in the recent campaign.22

As for the nature of the economic crisis, the differences are so strikingbetween the two countries as to compel rejecting, tout court, the Trump-as-Mussolini analogy. Italy following the First World War was in manyrespects a failing state, notwithstanding its having been on the winningside during that conflict. Apart from the war’s toll of destruction, in terms

19Robert Pear, Thomas Kaplan, and Maggie Haberman, “G.O.P. Revolt Sinks Bid to Void Health Law,”New York Times, 25 March 2017.20Alison Burke, “Working Class White Americans Are Now Dying in Middle Age at Faster Rates thanMinorityGroups,” 23 March 2017, accessed at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2017/03/23/working-class-white-americans-are-now-dying-in-middle-age-at-faster-rates-than-minority-groups/?utm_campaign=Brookings%20Brief&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=48909925,19 May 2017. See also Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century” (BrookingsPapers onEconomicActivity, BPEAConferenceDrafts, 23–24March 2017), accessed at https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/6_casedeaton.pdf, 19 May 2017.21Freedland, “Welcome to the Age of Trump.”22Loren Collingwood, “The County-by-County Data on Trump Voters Shows Why He Won,” WashingtonPost, 19 November 2016.


of both infrastructure23 and casualties,24 there loomed a series of problemsthat eventually eroded the legitimacy of the regime. These included thelasting effects of the catastrophic defeat at Caporetto in 1917, which gravelyundermined the prestige and authority of the army’s higher echelons;the conversion from a wartime to a peacetime economy—raising as itdid the important question of how to provide employment for the almostthree million veterans, many of them farmers; and finally, postwar infla-tion, stemming from a severe lack of primary commodities and igniting awidespread feeling of frustration and rage against the political system.

In contrast, today’s “crisis” in the United States is small beer. It may be(although even this is debated) that the country is “declining” relative tocertain “risers,” China foremost among them.25 Still, economic indicatorsreveal an enviable performance of the American economy: low unemploy-ment, high productivity, and evenmultiyear gross domestic product (GDP)growth—all of which, when set against the recent performance of mostEuropean countries (to say nothing of the so-called BRICs such as Braziland Russia), look and are distinctly robust.26 Recent American dataindicate that median income has been rising over the past three years(except amongwhite baby boomers), not only suggesting that the nature ofthe crisis is more a function of unmet expectations than it is of realstagnation but also highlighting how redistributive policies might affect,one way or the other, Trump’s political allure.27

For sure, what counts in politics is not necessarily what “objectively”may be the case. What counts is what people think is the case, and therecan be no doubt that Trump during the campaign succeeded in framinga much different discourse, one that was based on somber visions ofinexorably rising unemployment, hordes of ferocious immigrants flooding

23It is worth remembering that some regions, such as Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia, had been occupiedby Austrian and German forces. As late as the war’s final year, there were still 800,000 enemy soldiers inVeneto, who forced some 600,000 civilians to flee the region. See Patrizia Dogliani, Il Fascismo degliItaliani, 2nd ed. (Turin: UTET, 2008), 19.24Official data are not considered reliable. However, in a landmark study, Italian demographer GiorgioMortara ventured the very educated guess of some 651,000 Italian military deaths. Giorgio Mortara, LaSalute pubblica in Italia durante e dopo la Guerra (Bari: Laterza, and New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1925).25For skepticism regarding the declinist thesis, see Josef Joffe, The Myth of America’s Decline: Politics,Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014); and Stephen G.Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “The Once and Future Superpower: Why China Won’t Overtake theUnited States,” Foreign Affairs 95 (May/June 2016): 91–104.26Patricia Cohen, “President Obama Is Handing a Strong Economy to His Successor,” New York Times,2 December 2016.27Robert Shapiro, “Whatever Some Candidates Tell You, the Incomes of Most Americans Have BeenRising,” Brookings Blog, 27 April 2016, accessed at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2016/04/27/whatever-some-candidates-tell-you-the-incomes-of-most-americans-have-been-rising/, 19 May 2017.


uncontrolled over the U.S. border, and record-high crime rates. All of theserepresented alternative facts that nevertheless served him well with acertain segment of the electorate, as became evident on 8 November. Still,there is a tremendous difference between the conditions—objective as wellas subjective—with which the agricultural and war-torn Italian economicsystem was confronted in the 1920s and those facing today’s America.Mussolini sought and found fertile ground for the establishment of hisrule in deep societal cleavages and in the demonstrably evident failure ofthe previous liberal regime; it will scarcely be possible for Trump to havethe same results exploiting “crisis.”

As concerns the role of institutional actors, two stand out as criticalelements for the successful rise of fascism in the Italian case: the army andthe monarchy. In brief, historians agree that one of Mussolini’s mainachievements in 1920–1922 was to prevent any serious opposition fromthe military and the king. In fact, with reference to the former, it is worthstressing how the March on Rome (and Squadrist violence beforethat) would hardly have been possible without the substantial complicity(or lack of capacity) of the armed forces. Mussolini understood that byhaving the army and navy on his side, hewould reap several benefits—mostimportantly, reassuring the conservatives and monarchists on the right,keeping a free hand in his fight against the socialists and communists,and using the military career as a means of strengthening consensus. It isfor this reason that as early as the immediate aftermath of the Marchon Rome, the newly appointed Mussolini government reserved twoministerial seats, one for General Armando Diaz and one for AdmiralPaolo Camillo Thaon di Revel. Even later, Il Duce set aside for the upperspheres of the armed forces substantial organizational and budgetaryautonomy.28 Humiliated at Caporetto and deeply resentful of the civilian“interference” that had been a characteristic of the liberal (prewar) order,themilitary unsurprisingly accepted with no hesitationMussolini’s offer tocollaborate.

Mussolini’s handling of the military might suggest some similaritywith Trump’s administration, given the prominent role accorded toformer and current generals (James Mattis at the Department of Defense,H.R. McMaster at the National Security Council, and John Kelly at theDepartment of Homeland Security), to say nothing of the overall supportthe president has signaled for the armed forces, whose budget he proposed

28Marco Mondini, La politica delle armi: Il ruolo dell’esercito nell’avvento del fascismo (Roma-Bari:Laterza, 2006).


to increase by 10 percent, or $54 billion.29 However, some considerationssuggest we refrain from drawing any hasty inferences. To begin with, thestature of Diaz and Thaon di Revel was not at all comparable with thatof Mattis, McMaster, or Kelly. Trump evinces a genuine esteem forhis military colleagues, and most observers (not excluding some of thepresident’s critics) would agree that the generals are among the mostcompetent members of the Trump team—if, indeed, they are not themost competent. By contrast, Mussolini had a much less lofty regardfor both Diaz and Thaon di Revel, his ministers of war and the navy,respectively; their value to him was indirect, inhering to no small degree intheir closeness to the king. Mussolini neither relied on their counsel norshowed himself to be restrained in any significant way by their preferences.Indeed, both were led to resign, and to withdraw from public life, after justa few short years in Mussolini’s cabinet, Diaz departing at the end ofApril 1924 and Thaon di Revel in May 1925.

Trump’s case is otherwise. His choice of the two ex-generals and the oneserving general (McMaster) was hardly needed to curry favor with anAmerican military establishment that tended to be supportive of himfrom the outset; instead, his choice was a function of an inexperiencedpresident’s desire to fulfill his promise to “hire the best and brightest.”Admittedly, it remains far too early to conclude that the generalshave definitively counterbalanced the ostensible influence of some ofTrump’s other members of the inner circle (first and foremost StephenK. Bannon).30 Regardless of the actual power wielded by Trump’s militaryadvisers, there is a world of difference from the Italian experience. Whilethe Italian army readily surrendered to the fascist leader, no onedoubts that the American armed forces remain zealous to preserve theirindependent role, all the while, of course, rendering constitutional homageto the country’s long-standing tradition by which the military defers tocivilian political leadership.

There is nothing remotely analogous with the Italian experience when itcomes to that other institution, the monarchy, America having resolved itsrelationship with kings (and queens) a long time ago. In Italy, the monar-chy managed to retain an autonomous capacity and, differently from otherstate institutions, even to preserve a substantial degree of authority for a

29Alan Rappeport and Glenn Thrush, “Trump Budget Seeks Big Tilt To the Military,” New York Times,16 March 2017.30Fred Kaplan, “The Grown-Ups Are Locked Out. Trump Is Depriving Tillerson, Mattis, and McMaster ofAny Real Influence or Support,” Slate, 15 March 2017, accessed at http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2017/03/the_powerlessness_of_mattis_mcmaster_and_tillerson.html,19 May 2017.


short time after the war. It is worth remembering that Mussolini himselfmade a U-turn from his wartime—and highly vocal—republicanism to amonarchism that may have been watered-down and reluctantly embracedbut was not without its utility to him. According to Patrizia Dogliani,sticking to the king helped fascism garner support from the southernaristocracy, convinced as it was that Giovanni Giolitti’s liberal projecthad simply been a usurpation of power by the northern (mostly Piedmon-tese) elite. And although it is true that the consolidation of the regimequickly eroded the effective power of the king, the monarchy formallyremained an autonomous center of power throughout the ventennio (thatis, the two-decade period of fascist rule).31

Mussolini played his cards very skillfully, in the process effectivelyneutralizing institutional counterweights. Trump, on the other hand,seems to have no clear ideas on how to counter the opposition that hisrise to power has already begun to generate in Washington.32 Clearly,he has not had to bother appeasing any monarchs, but the checks andbalances of the American political system do feature actors as powerfulas the Congress, especially the Senate, whose Republican majority canlook a bit deceptive, given that at least a half dozen GOP senatorscannot be taken to be guaranteed allies of the president.33 Nor, asthe difficulty in repealing Obamacare illustrates, can the presidenteven count on commanding the loyalty of the House. Then there isthe judiciary, to say nothing of the bureaucracy of the executive branchitself, which cannot at all be assumed to be ready to follow where aPresident Trump would desire to lead it; in fact, some have suggestedthat, like Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump has deliberately amassed acabinet of “rivals” (not necessarily of his, but of their fellow cabinetmembers), so as to constitute a further balance, and perhaps even acheck.34

To sum up, while there may be a few features of Trump’s campaign thatechoed tenets and forms of fascism, it is unlikely that the real estate tycoonaugurs, as some seem to fear, the second coming of Mussolini. But can wesay the same about the Trump-as-Berlusconi trope?

31Dogliani, Il Fascismo degli Italiani, 52.32Editorial Board, “Donald Trump, Bureaucracy Apprentice,” New York Times, 2 January 2017.33One thinks in this regard of both Arizona senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, to say nothing ofSouth Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, Maine’s Susan Collins, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Tennessee’s LamarAlexander, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, and Kentucky’s Rand Paul. See Carl Hulse, “Trump’s Next Battle:Keeping These Republicans Happy,” New York Times, 27 November 2016.34See Thomas Wright, “Trump’s Team of Rivals, Riven by Distrust,” Foreign Policy, 14 December 2016,accessed at http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/12/14/trumps-team-of-rivals-riven-by-distrust/, 13 June 2017.


IF THE SHOE FITS: ANALOGIZING BETWEEN TRUMP AND

BERLUSCONIAs Donald Trump was defying all the odds and continuing his mostimprobable ascent throughout the 2016 GOP primary campaign, therewas a rising chorus of concern in Europe (as elsewhere). This concern wasnot surprising, for to many on the Old Continent, Trump seemed all toofamiliar a politician. He reminded them of Silvio Berlusconi, a contempo-rary Italian political figure not universally cherished in European (includ-ing Italian) public memory. Right off the bat, and for this reason alone, wecan see a much greater degree of “fit” between Trump and Berlusconi thanwe detected between the former and Mussolini. Comparisons betweenTrump and Berlusconi can provide both a logical and a narrative shortcutfor political analysis, as well as for normative assessment.35 For if SilvioBerlusconi had been earlier deemed “unfit to lead Italy,”36 as well as “unfitto lead Europe,”37 then how, wonderedmany, could it be that his Americandoppelg€anger, Donald Trump, could be thought capable of leading theworld’s remaining superpower, the United States of America? (Of course,more than a few Italian voters had decided that Berlusconi, after all,was fitto rule their country, three times, in fact, from 1994 to 2011.) Now, none ofus are deluded enough to believe that American voters this past Novemberwere taking cues from recent Italian political developments—not even for ananosecond. Nonetheless, the comparison with Berlusconi is suggestive,for the similarities between the former Italian leader and the American oneare numerous and various, ranging as they do from the significant, forexample, a common appreciation of the virtues of Russia’s Vladimir Putin,to the trivial, for instance, a close scrutiny of hairstyles (their own). For thesake of simplicity, we group in this section the most relevant of thesecommonalities around three axes, highlighting personality, policies, andpolitics.

Regarding personalities, it has to be said that Berlusconi and Trumpshare some individual traits in abundance. Both are successful entrepre-neurs whose core business is amixture of real estate and entertainment, the

35See Beppe Severgnini, “What Italy Can Teach America about Donald Trump,” New York Times, 18September 2015; Rula Jebreal, “Donald Trump Is America’s Silvio Berlusconi,” Washington Post, 21September 2015; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Is Trump the New Silvio Berlusconi?,” CNN, 3 March 2016, accessedat http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/03/opinions/trump-the-new-silvio-berlusconi-opinion-benghiat/, 19May 2017; Luigi Zingales, “Donald Trump, Crony Capitalist,” New York Times, 23 February 2016; andRobert Tracinsky, “Donald Trump Is America’s Berlusconi, Whose Drama Trumped His Agenda,”Federalist, 15 February 2016, accessed at http://thefederalist.com/2016/02/15/donald-trump-is-americas-berlusconi-whose-rhetoric-won-his-country-nothing/, 19 May 2017.36“Why Silvio Berlusconi Is Unfit to Lead Italy,” The Economist, 26 April 2001.

37“Unfit to Lead Europe,” The Economist, 28 May 2003.


latter including sports for the Italian tycoon, once owner of a world-renowned soccer team, A.C. Milan. Both have been rich enough to financetheir own political activities without depending on established politicalparties.38 Both are successful communicators who hook up with peoplereasonably effectively. Both deliberately disregard social conventions andrules of etiquette in order to command attention and attraction. Both haveegos that, to put it mildly, hardly suffer from psychological malnutrition.

Second, insofar as it makes sense to compare the program of a leaderwho had nearly a decade’s experience as prime minister to that of apresident who has not yet (as we write these words in late March 2017)served more than two months in any elective office, we could note thatsome keywords crop up in the agenda of each. In the economic domain,these include low taxes, competition, shrinking government and stateagencies, a pro-market approach (yet one easily compromised by cronycapitalism at home, of which both are champions),39 and hostility towardglobalization. As to the political domain, the core keyword seems to be thecountry itself, invariably needing to be strengthened and defended againstexistential threats. Berlusconi’s list of dangers included communists,judges, the free media, and immigrants.40 Up to now, Muslims andMexicans have scored very highly on Trump’s list of miscreants, althoughjudges have also been making inroads, along with the media. It comes as asurprise to no one that this stance of theirs spreads and entrenchesdivisions at both the domestic and international level, and coalesces nicelywith their expressed preference for bilateral over multilateral frameworksin foreign policy.41 As to policymaking, both politicians support the ideathat good government requires, above all, managerial skills, even morethan it does an ability to build consensus.

Eventually, the focus on politics brings us around to the basal similaritybetween the two men: their populism.42 Both evince an antagonisticattitude toward professional politicians and established parties. Theynurture a narrative within which they are self-made men who defendand represent the “true” interests of the “people” directly. Berlusconi’s

38Forza Italia, the political party built from scratch by Berlusconi in a fewmonths, has been termed “an idealtype of personal party.” SeeMauro Calise, “The Personal Party: An Analytical Framework,” Italian PoliticalScience Review 45 (November 2015): 301–315, at 306.39In this regard, see Zingales’s distinction between pro-business and pro-market platforms, in “DonaldTrump, Crony Capitalist.”40It is worth recalling, however, that as a leader, Berlusconi did not adopt a particularly tough stance againstimmigrants; nevertheless, his coalition did, and in 2002 the Berlusconi government supported theBossi-Fini Bill that criminalized irregular migrants.41“Transcript: Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign Policy Views,” New York Times, 26 March 2016.

42Berman, “Donald Trump Isn’t a Fascist.”


antiestablishment stance was magnificently exemplified at the 2010Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe summit in Paris,when he quoted Mussolini’s lament about being “powerless because thepower is held and exerted by party officials”—a lament that the primeminister offered as a means of illustrating how he saw himself, namely, asa common man willing to confront the establishment, even if the latterincluded members of his own party.43 The personal legitimacy that directrelationship with the people gives the leader figures generally in populism,but it takes on a special flavor in Berlusconi’s and Trump’s cases because ofthe influence they can exert on the public, thanks to the media they eithercontrolled (Berlusconi) or whose attention they unfailingly command(Trump). In this regard, Ilvo Diamanti has noted that the concept ofthe people is a variable one, in Berlusconi’s usage: it can mean the voters,who express their preferences and interests in the ballot box at regularintervals, or it canmean public opinion, which can be constantly marketedand surveyed in order to legitimate the decisions of the leader.44

In brief, Berlusconi and Trump attest to the attractiveness, amongcertain voters, of the personalization of politics—an attractiveness that,these days, is scarcely limited to Italy and the United States, we hasten toadd.45 Their personal characteristics are relevant to the political productthey offer. Their personal resources allow them to play an antiestablish-ment role and to influence the people, whose steady support they need tosustain their personal political legitimacy. Their unconventional styles ofpolitical communication are remarkably similar, so much so that we canimagine the two political figures as near-perfect mirror images of eachother.

If Berlusconi and Trump are outstanding personifications of populisminmoderndemocracies, shouldwe expect to see similar outcomes stemmingfrom similar political styles? More particularly, although we have alreadyargued why Trump can hardly be compared with Mussolini, how shouldwe assess Trump’s and Berlusconi’s apprehended (to many observers)“authoritarian” turns?

According to Sheri Berman, today’s populists—Trump, Marine Le Pen,and a growing list of others in Europe and elsewhere—“certainly share

43“Berlusconi cita Mussolini all’OSCE. ‘Io non ho nessun potere,’” La Repubblica, 27 May 2010.

44“Publitalia, the advertising arm of Berlusconi’s company Fininvest” contributed mightily to the creation

and leadership of Forza Italia; see Ilvo Diamanti, “The Italian Centre-Right and Centre-Left: BetweenParties and ‘The Party,’” West European Politics 30 (September 2007): 733–762.45See Fareed Zakaria, “Populism on the March: Why the West Is in Trouble,” Foreign Affairs 95(November/December 2016): 9–15; and Rick Lyman, “Eastern Europe’s Populists Emboldened inLimiting Foreign Groups,” New York Times, 2 March 2017.


some similarities with the inter-war fascists.” Like those earlier figures,“today’s right-wing extremists denounce incumbent democratic leaders asinefficient, unresponsive, and weak. They promise to nurture their nation,protect it from its enemies, and restore a sense of purpose to people whofeel battered by forces outside their control.” But for all that, they are notantidemocratic, even if they are decidedly antiliberal. Their mission, theysay, is to perfect democracy, not replace it, and they promise bettergovernment. The upshot is that when they do come to power, it can beassumed that the “continued existence of democracy will permit theirsocieties to opt for a do-over by later voting them out. Indeed, this maybe democracy’s greatest strength: it allows countries to recover from theirmistakes.”46

If this is so, then what can the Italian case tell us? More to the point, ifthis shoe fits so well, can we assume that Berlusconi’s legacy provides ussome “teachable moments”when it comes to President Trump’s prospects,domestic and international? To answer this question, we first need to raisea prior question, one that askswhether, and if so, how, Berlusconimanagedto change contemporary Italy—in the process without damaging it funda-mentally as a well-consolidated democracy with a developed economy,something Italy had not been at the beginning of the twentieth century.

To start with, it has to be acknowledged that Berlusconi contributed tothe restructuring of the Italian party system by successfully acting as acoalition builder—almost despite himself.47 He “occupied and expanded apolitical space that had previously been politically narrow and fragmented—the Right—drawing together two completely different political forces:the post-fascist right-wing National Alliance (AN) . . . and the NorthernLeague (LN) which supported the independence of the north and radicalpolitical change. In their traditions, language and strongholds, AN and theLeague represent opposed political formations.”48

Berlusconi thus became the right-wing equilibrium point of theItalian party system. And he became the longest-serving prime ministerin contemporary Italy thanks to his coalitional skills. Nevertheless,Berlusconi’s cabinets did suffer—although not to any great extent—from the structural fragility that typically affected Italian governments

46Sheri Berman, “Populism Is Not Fascism: But It Could Be a Harbinger,” Foreign Affairs 95 (November/December 2016): 39–44, at 43.47Donatella Campus and Gianfranco Pasquino, “Leadership in Italy: The Changing Role of Leaders inElections and in Government,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 14 (April 2006): 25–40; andGianfranco Pasquino, “Five Faces of Silvio Berlusconi: The Knight of Anti-politics,” Modern Italy 12(February 2007): 39–54.48Diamanti, “Italian Centre-Right and Centre-Left,” 736.


supported by heterogeneous and fragmented parliamentarymajorities. Theresult is that despite his much-ballyhooed record, Berlusconi remainedconstantly hemmed in by parliamentary politics, Italian style. Being thelongest-serving leader since theSecondWorldWardidnotmakeBerlusconithe archetypal “strongman.”

Furthermore, it needs to be noted that Berlusconi’s freedomofmaneuverwas steadily checkedandbalancedbyother constitutional powers. In fact, heengaged in a decade-long arm-wrestling contest with constitutional judgesand presidents of the republic (the latter the supreme guarantor of nationalunity and fair political competition), each of whom repeatedly exerted theirpowers to block or change laws intended to advantage Berlusconi’s personalinterests or persona.

For instance, in 2004 and 2009, the constitutional court rejected twodifferent laws meant to make Berlusconi immune from prosecution, theso-called Schifani Arbitration Bill and the Alfano Arbitration Bill. In 2013,this court paved the way for the Mediaset trial that Berlusconi had tried todelay since 2005—a trial in which he was eventually found guilty. In 2014,the constitutional court threw out the electoral reform that Berlusconi’smajority had passed in 2004 so as to cripple the likely victory of the center-left coalition led by Romano Prodi and through which Italian parliamentswould be elected in 2006, 2008, and 2013.

The most complicated arm-wrestling arrayed Berlusconi againstthe head of state, the political institution to which Italians traditionallygive their staunchest support and, therefore, the institution thatalways presents the greatest challenge to any populist leader. In fact,Berlusconi regularly complained about the three presidents with whomhe successively had to deal—Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi,and Giorgio Napolitano—mainly because they exercised the power tonominate primeministers instead of dissolving the chambers after cabinetcrises, but also because they exercised—or threatened to exercise—theirsuspensive veto on legislation that was ad hoc or constitutionallyillegitimate.

Berlusconi’s power was weakened by scandals and trials and con-strained by political coalitions and institutions. However, his biggestproblem turned out to be his inability to satisfy the lofty expectations hehimself had raised—expectations that first took root in the populistvogue that led to the ending of the so-called First Republic, whose demisewas accompanied by a nationwide corruption scandal implicating largesegments of the political establishment. This afforded him a window ofopportunity flung wide open by widespread disaffection with a politicalstatus quo characterized by both rigidity and instability. At first, Berlusconi


profited from the opportunity to drain the Italian swamp, promising todo so through structural political change and a new economic “miracle,”which was supposed to lead to a return to the kind of burgeoningdevelopment Italy had known right after the Second World War.

So much for the promise. The reality was that Berlusconi left Italy insomewhat worse shape than he had found it. In 1994, Italian percapita GDP exceeded the average for OECD (Organisation for EconomicCo-operation and Development) countries; by 2010, it had fallen belowthat average.49 Italian total central government debt was 113.7 percent ofItalian GDP in 1994; in 2010, it was still stubbornly high, at 109 percent.50

In qualitative terms, the best that can be said of Berlusconi is that he onlymarginally realized a few of the many structural reforms of which Italywas in dire need and which he promised to effect for the necessarymodernization of the country. This negative assessment of Berlusconi’sperformance as a prime minister is clearly reflected in European reactionsto his 2011 resignation. For instance, Le Monde declared that (After adecade in power, Silvio Berlusconi leaves Italy in the exact same state inwhich he found it)“[a]pr�es dix ans de r�egne, Silvio Berlusconi laisse l’Italiedans l’�etat o�u il l’a trouv�ee.”51 Even harsher was the judgment of theEconomist, to which Silvio Berlusconi was the man who, in plain English,“screwed an entire country.”52

All in all, we can conclude that the legacy that Berlusconi bequeathedItaly has been a botched opportunity to bring about long overdue, andabsolutely essential, reform. He promised much; he delivered little. This,in turn, has fueled even greater political distrust, with all that it impliesfor the likelihood of the continued vitality of the country’s democraticpolitical culture. Are there any lessons here for America under DonaldTrump? If, as we have argued, Trump is no Mussolini, but he may wellbe a Berlusconi, what kinds of analytical “takeaways” might we expectto see?

49Italy’s per capita GDP in the earlier year stood at an index ranking of 113.1, with the OECD averageequaling 100; by 2010, the Italian figure was 99. Data are at 2010 price levels and purchasing power parity.The comparison with the other big continental EU members confirms the mediocre Italian performance:Spain’s GDP per capita rose from 87 in 1994 to 91.2 in 2010; France’s and Germany’s each declined, albeitnot as sharply as Italy’s, from 107.7 to 102.7 in the French case, and 117.1 to 113.9 in Germany. See OECDStatistics, accessed at http://stats.oecd.org/#, 27 May 2016.50Ibid. Spain’s public debtwas 50.3 percent of GDP in 1994 and 51.7 percent in 2010; figures for France andGermany reveal that for the former, there was in this same period an increase from 38.4 percent to 67.4percent of GDP, while for the latter, the increase was from 20.9 percent to 44.4 percent. Unlike Italy, noneof these countries had a debt surpassing the national GDP.51Le Monde, 12 November 2011.52The Economist, 9 June 2011.


First, it bears repeating that although Trump’s brand of populismhas battened upon a popular dissatisfaction with the American politicalsystem, no one should ever be allowed to confuse the dysfunctional natureof U.S. politics with the much more troubled Italian system that served asthe backdrop for Berlusconi’s rise to power. Earlier, we remarked that theAmerica of 2017 is not, and never could be, the Italy of 1922; here it sufficesto note that neither is it the Italy of 1994. As a consequence, Trump’sfreedom of action and his likely influence on the political system as a wholecan be expected to be much more limited than were Berlusconi’s.

Second, we need to recall how relevant Berlusconi’s control of the mediaproved to be for his initial political successes. In this regard, it is noteworthyhow different the Italian and the American broadcasting systems are fromeach other. In the United States, the development of cable television in the1970s, combined with widespread deregulation a decade later, resulted in amedia system dominated by a plurality of private companies that do notadhere strictly to state regulations—or at least to state preferences. In Italy,while the development of private broadcasting companies and even cabletelevision also took place, it was nevertheless relatively easy for Berlusconi,thanks to his political backers, to succeed in obtaining a quasi monopolyof the private sector,mainly because the development of cable televisionwascomparatively slow and remained constrained by political obstacles untilvery recently; all of this reduced the significance and the sizeofprivatemediaoutlets. Given that the Italian state broadcasting company has been, andremains, substantially controlled by political institutions and influenced bypolitical parties and the government, Berlusconi while in office attained adegree of influence over both private and state broadcasting media thatTrump cannot even dream of possessing, even though he is now president.In short, there was no Italian equivalent of Stephen Bannon’s snarky, if notentirely inaccurate, characterization of the mainstream American media asthe “opposition party.” Nor could there be.

Third, the constitutional features of American democracy are so muchmore robust than those of Italian democracy as almost to defy meaningfulcomparison. True, the presidency of the United States is a much morepowerful institution than any European parliamentary premiership, Italy’sincluded. It is also true that the powers of the presidency have grown inrespect to both Congress and the states since at least the Second WorldWar, if not earlier.53 Yet the American constitutional system of checks and

53Theodore J. Lowi, The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1985); and John Yoo, Crisis and Command: The History of Executive Power from GeorgeWashington to George W. Bush (New York: Kaplan, 2010).


balances is even more powerful than the executive. As Richard Neustadtreminds us, although the Constitutional Convention of 1787 might havebeen thought to have yielded a “government of ‘separated powers’[,] [i]tdid nothing of the sort. Rather, it created a government of separatedinstitutions sharing powers.”54 This is unlike the situation in Europeandemocracies, even if they too feature a separation of powers. In the UnitedStates, there is a binary fission that is not encountered in most Europeandemocracies, “based on the conscious segmentation of sovereignty, firstalong territorial lines (i.e. between the federated states and the federalstate) and subsequently between governmental lines (i.e. between thefederal governmental institutions).”55

We can expect that America’s more complex system of diffusing andchecking power will serve as a greater constraint upon Donald Trump’sfreedom of action than the looser Italian system did on Silvio Berlusconi.This is so, even if President Trump can avail himself (nominally, at least) ofa Congress whose two houses are controlled by his own party, for, as we sawin the preceding section, this can turn out to be a very mixed blessing.

There remains one final aspect of the Berlusconi trope that warrantsmention: the Italian prime minister’s foreign policy record. Is thereanything in the manner in which Silvio Berlusconi directed Italian foreignaffairs that might shed some light on how Donald Trump will seek to steertheAmerican ship of state? If there is, inwhat does it consist? Some analystsdo believe that Berlusconi changed both the form and the substance ofItalian foreign policy.56 Regarding form, he strongly personalized Italiandiplomacy, fortified in the belief that his personal charisma could bothease “intimate relationship with important world leaders . . . [and] confergreater international status on him and his country.”57 These personalspecial relationships also magnified Berlusconi’s concern for political com-munication and set the stage for him to pursue the “announcement policy,”according to which the essence of diplomatic intercourse lies in hostingevents at which “several important announcement are to be made.”58

54Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership fromRoosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free Press, 1990), 29.55Sergio Fabbrini, Compound Democracies: Why the United States and Europe Are Becoming Similar(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 143.56See, for instance, James Walston, “Italian Foreign Policy in the ‘Second Republic’: Changes of Form andSubstance,” Modern Italy 12 (February 2007): 91–104.57Sergio Romano, “Italian Foreign Policy after the End of the ColdWar,” Journal ofModern Italian Studies14 (March 2009): 8–14.58Filippo Andreatta and Elisabetta Brighi, “The Berlusconi Government’s Foreign Policy: The First18 Months,” in Jean Blondel and Paolo Segatti, eds., Italian Politics: The Second Berlusconi Government(New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 221–236, at 224.


Regarding the substance of Italy’s foreign policy, Berlusconi changed itby recalibrating the relative importance of traditional frameworks of thecountry’s international posture. For instance, prior to 2001, “‘Europeanintegration’ was a mantra of Italian foreign policy; under Berlusconi,Italy discovered euroscepticism.”59 Illustrative of this, the following yearsaw Berlusconi’s decision to abandon the Airbus A400M long-rangemilitary transport aircraft, a European military procurement projectthat possessed enormous symbolic value linked to the “creation of ajoint European defense system, which Italy had traditionally calledfor.”60 Most importantly, while before 2001, Italy had sought to balancethe Atlantic, European, and Mediterranean frameworks in its foreignpolicy, under Berlusconi, Italy “took a decidedly more pro-Americanstance . . . at the expense of relations with traditional European andMiddleEastern partners,” to the extent of actively supporting the U.S. invasion ofIraq in 2003 and participating in postinvasion operations, thus distancingitself loudly from the traditional engine of European integration, theFranco-German “axis.”61

All in all, Berlusconi’s personal diplomacy favored the development ofdirect bilateral relationships with great powers, and it was assumed thata clear pro-U.S. posture would increase Italian international influence.Yet these changes neither improved the international standing of thecountry nor made Berlusconi a key figure in transatlantic relations; tothe contrary, Berlusconi’s provocative behavior and statements attractedthe attention of Italian and international media, in the process damag-ing the country’s reputation and diminishing its perceived reliabilitywithin the European Union (EU). Nor did it help matters that at thestart of Italy’s presidency of the EU, in July 2003, Berlusconi “alienatedmore than just the Socialists in the European Parliament when hesuggested that one of them, the German Martin Schulz, would besuitable to play the role of a Nazi concentration camp kapo.”62 Bythe time he stepped down in 2011, Berlusconi’s choice to deemphasizethe European dimension for the sake of special bilateral relationswith the United States (as well as, it bears noting, with Russia) resultedin marginalizing the country in European diplomatic circles, leadingto its exclusion from informal groupings through which the larger

59Walston, “Italian Foreign Policy,” 98.60Andreatta and Brighi, “Berlusconi Government’s Foreign Policy,” 227.61Filippo Andreatta, “Italian Foreign Policy: Domestic Politics, International Requirements and theEuropean Dimension,” European Integration 30 (March 2008): 169–181, at 175.62Walston, “Italian Foreign Policy,” 98. Schulz recently assumed the leadership of Germany’s SocialDemocrats and will square off against Chancellor Angela Merkel in the federal election later in 2017.


EU members were seeking to comanage such compelling issues andcrises as the Balkans and Afghanistan wars and the nuclear deal withIran.

So, to recap a bit, if we are convinced that Trump is no Mussolini butthat he may well be the “Berlusconi” that Jeff Greenfield, David Brooks,and somany others assume him to be, what would this likelymean, first forAmerican domestic politics but also, and perhaps even especially, for thesecond question that has animated our writing of this article, namely, theimplications of the Italian tutorial for the transatlantic relationship?With respect to the first question, we have already tipped our hand: wecan take it as given that if Italy could have weathered the long Berlusconiera without toomuch lasting damage being inflicted upon the vitality of itsdemocracy, then America, with its much more hearty network of institu-tional constraints upon executive power, will prove itself highly capableof accommodating its own version with much less difficulty thanthe chorus of Trump critics believe possible. On this score, we are morethan reasonably upbeat: American democracy will survive, perhaps evenbe strengthened, as a result of the current Trump interlude. However, wetake muchmore seriously the potential damage that Trump-as-Berlusconimight do to the transatlantic relationship America has with its allies, ata time when the former will definitely be grating upon the sensibilities ofthe latter, stimulating a resurgence of a kind of anti-Americanism withinthe transatlantic community that was on such vivid display prior to thearrival of Barack Obama in power. Only this time around, the “friendlyfire anti-Americanism”

63 in the Western world will be energized not at allby worries about “unipolarity” and a lack of “balance” in the internationalsystem and insteadwill be focused upon concerns related to the personalityand behavioral pattern of the American chief executive. Let us now turn tothis, the second question animating this article.

THE ITALIAN TUTORIAL, ANTI-AMERICANISM, AND THE

FUTURE OF TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONSTo the extent that Trump is, in some important sense, Berlusconi, theanalogy depends more upon shared personality traits than it does uponanything else, which is quite different from the Trump-Mussolini analogy,in which we argued that sociopolitical context was far more significantthan personality. Above all, the meaning of the Berlusconi trope is

63To borrow imagery suggested more than a decade ago by Julia E. Sweig, Friendly Fire: Losing Friendsand Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006).


dependent upon the sometimes ineffable notion of “temperament.” This iswhat bringing the “bunga bunga”64 to America implies: that the UnitedStates is being led by a chief executive who demonstrates many of thepersonality foibles—not excluding lack of focus and a propensity towardprevarication—put on such regular display by Silvio Berlusconi. This, isturn, can be counted upon to generate an unhealthy erosion of the ability ofPresident Trump’s fellow leaders in the Atlantic alliance to have muchconfidence in his judgment or to trust his leadership.

This is why the Italianization thesis possesses significance for thetransatlantic alliance. It is not that Silvio Berlusconi proved to betroublesome for transatlantic relations during the previous decade; infact, it would be almost easier to say the opposite, to argue that injoining with several other European leaders to support George W. Bush,even in what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq, Berlusconiactually helped contain the damage that the war threatened to wreakupon the alliance at a particularly fraught moment.65 It is the character,not the foreign policy, of Berlusconi that is germane here. Obviously,character is important in the domestic political arena as well. But unlikein the American domestic arena, where there are abundant institutionalconstraints on quixotic individuals, in the international setting, the coinof institutionalism will always be a secondary measure of political value,important to a degree but not nearly as important as the currency ofexchange resulting from the melding of common interests and sharedvalues. Trust matters in domestic politics; it matters even more ininternational relationships, especially with important allies. A lack oftrust correlates positively with an absence of both shared interests andvalues.

This is what gives the Italian tutorial such relevance for the discussion ofthe future of the transatlantic relationship. Already in the United States(and it goes without saying, in Europe as well), there are any number ofanalysts who are prepared to agree with Republican dissidents such asEliot Cohen and predict an unhappy—nay, calamitous—outcome for theTrump era, domestically as well as internationally. Cohen’s analysis mayseem apocalyptic, but to us it deserves citing here, if only because of itsreference to foreign policy.

64Pasquali, “Americans, Brace Yourselves for the Bunga Bunga.” The expression has been associated with avariety of behavioral traits linked with Berlusconi, many of these connected with his penchant for sexparties. As we use it here, it simply connotes highly quirky, erratic behavior, especially when manifested bythe leader of a country.65For a reminder of those strains of a dozen or so years ago, see Elizabeth Pond, Friendly Fire: The Near-Death of the Transatlantic Alliance (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004).


Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it willnot get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and thosearound him. It will probably end in calamity—substantial domestic protestand violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships,the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (evenwith China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising inthe slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner,with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. The soonerAmericans get used to these likelihoods, the better.66

Is Cohen’s pessimism justified in the sphere of foreign policy? DoesTrump bid fair to exacerbate relations with the Europeans so as to lead toNATO’s “collapse”? We tend to doubt that he does, but even if thealliance will survive, there is every likelihood that the coming yearswill witness a reemergence of the geopolitical tropism that looked tohave been finally laid to rest during the Obama years. That tropism, ofcourse, is associated with the concept of “anti-Americanism” in transat-lantic relations, that is, what we referred to earlier as “friendly fireanti-Americanism” (FFAA) or what has been called by others “lite”anti-Americanism.67 Whatever it is called, what makes this dispensationinteresting, as well as potentially troubling, is that it is an attitudinalderivative of America’s relationships with its traditional allies rather thanits familiar adversaries. As such, it could be argued to detract fromAmerica’s overall power in a way that confronting an adversary cannotconsistently do (in fact, confronting adversaries can often be donedeliberately, so as to mobilize resources and augment overall capability,with NSC-68 representing the best, although hardly the only, Cold Warapplication of such an approach).68 We think the signs of a reemergingFFAA have already begun to manifest themselves, but before we leap tothe conclusion that NATO therefore is doomed and that Trump-as-Berlusconi is the culprit, we need to approach the question in a nuancedfashion. Especially, we need to exercise caution in demonstrating whatwe think FFAA has entailed in the recent past, for unless we understandthe recent record of this dispensation, we will be at a loss to explainwhether, and if so, how, anti-Americanism’s return in the Trump era

66Eliot A. Cohen, “A Clarifying Moment in American History,” The Atlantic, 29 January 2017, accessed athttps://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/a-clarifying-moment-in-american-history/514868/, 19 May 2017. See also David Brooks, “The Republican Fausts,”New York Times, 31 January 2017and Gail Collins, “Trump Stays Buggy,” New York Times, 18 March 2017.67Mois�es Naím, “The Perils of Lite Anti-Americanism,” Foreign Policy 136 (May/June 2003): 95–96.68See John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American NationalSecurity Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 89–126.


might generate important consequences for America’s relationship withEuropean allies.

We find it helpful to introduce at this juncture a framework for analysisthat will be familiar to many students of international politics. We referto Kenneth Waltz’s three “images,” or levels of analysis, stemming fromhis Columbia University dissertation, which led to his first and, insome respects, most significant book, titled Man, the State, and War: ATheoretical Analysis.69 What Waltz labeled the “first image” puts thecausative emphasis upon individual decision makers; his “second image”privileges the makeup of the discrete “units” of the international system,inquiring as it does into particular traits of individual states or the societiescontained within them (or both); and his “third image” highlights theinternational system as the most important level of analysis—the systembeing understood both by its organizing principle of anarchy and itsdistribution of relative capability (also known as “power”).

Although the subject matter that inspired Waltz’s inquiry was the“cause” of war, we believe his framework can be applied to any numberof other queries in international politics, including and especially thoseprobing the nature and political significance of anti-Americanism in thetransatlantic political sphere. How so? First-image analysts of FFAAwould claim it is primarily, if not exclusively, a function of the personalitiesand behavior of American presidents; second-image analysts wouldemphasize societal (cultural) cleavages as between the United States andthe transatlantic allies; and third-image analysts would stress howFFAA iscorrelated with asymmetries in power between Washington and the otherNATO members, irrespective of personalities and cultures.

Anti-Americanism has been a topic of great debate in recent years, andnot only in the particular variant covered here. Like so many importantconcepts in political science, it has resisted easy definition and sparked agreat deal of controversy, to say nothing of heaps of scholarly and policyresearch.70 Often, it has been second-image analyses that have set the

69KennethWaltz,Man, the State, andWar: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press,1959).70Examples include Paul Hollander, Anti-Americanism: Irrational and Rational (New Brunswick, NJ:Transaction, 1995); Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Hating America: A History (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2004); John Gibson, Hating America: The New World Sport (New York: Regan Books,2004); Russell Berman, Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem (Stanford, CA: HooverInstitution Press, 2004); Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, America Against the World: How We AreDifferent and Why We Are Disliked (New York: Times Books, 2006); Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O.Keohane, eds., Anti-Americanisms in World Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); andMax Paul Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in AmericanForeign Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).


temper of the transatlantic debate over anti-Americanism, with thevery definition of the concept derived from societal disputes of endlessemotional contention. As explained by Josef Joffe, European second-imagecritiques of the United States, which were encountered frequently duringthe George W. Bush years, batten upon the construction of heterostereo-types, or negative images of an Other, and can bear little or no relation to areasoned critique of American foreign or domestic policy behavior.These traits represent, in Joffe’s words, the “obsessive stereotypization,denigration, and demonization of the country and the culture as a whole,”in which visions of a “Yahoo America” are juxtaposed with those of a“Superior Europe.”71 Two American students of the issue providefour hallmarks of such attitudinal (second-image) anti-Americanism,characterized by systematic antagonism toward an America held toincarnate evil; deliberate exaggeration of the country’s shortcomingscoupled with a denial that it might possess any merits; sustainedmisrepresentation of America for the purposes of advancing a politicalagenda; and constant misperception and ridiculing of American society.72

It is fair to say that second-image anti-Americanism is the variant thatcan be guaranteed to agitate Americans the most, particularly when itemanates from European allies that, to varying degrees, have been depen-dent upon American taxpayers’ largess to keep them protected, either fromthe erstwhile Soviet Union or from themselves. It is for this reason thatWalter McDougall, a shrewd observer of America’s foreign policy, chosein 1997 to begin his magisterial study of the country’s strategic cultureby quoting some lines from Randy Newman’s satirical song “PoliticalScience,” in which the singer highlighted the unerring ability of alliesto, as McDougall put it, “get our goat” with their constant criticisms.73

Admittedly, there was nothing new, in the 1990s, about the tendency ofAmerican allies (either their leaders or their publics, or both) to criticizeparticular aspects of U.S. foreign and domestic policies.74 Regularly duringthe Cold War, Washington seemed to be at odds with many of its friends

71Josef Joffe, “Dissecting Anti-isms,” The American Interest 1 (Summer 2006): 164–170. See also Joffe,€Uberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), chap. 3, “The Rise ofAnti-Americanism.”72Rubin and Rubin, Hating America, viii–ix.73Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 9.74See Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (Paris: Calman-L�evy, 1957); Annie Kriegel, “Consis-tent Misapprehension: European Views of America and Their Logic,” Daedalus 101 (Fall 1972): 87–102;Thierry Maulnier, “L’Antiam�ericanisme et les Am�ericains,” Revue des Deux Mondes 145 (March 1975):522–526; and Marcus Cunliffe, “The Anatomy of Anti-Americanism,” in Rob Kroes and Maarten vanRossem, eds., Anti-Americanism in Europe (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1986), 20–36.


and allies, somuch so that one U.S. defense secretary in the administrationof Jimmy Carter was heard to query, apropos the receipt of news that thealliance had fallen into disarray, “When has NATO ever been in array?”75

As we know, these intra-alliance tensions of the Cold War, howevergrave theymay have appeared at the time, ultimately proved to be less thanfatal from the point of view of America’s (and, it must be said, its allies’)overriding interest, namely, the containment of the Soviet Union and thesafeguarding of transatlantic security. The Soviets were held in check untilthey finally collapsed; theWestern Europeans never did experience either aSoviet invasion or, just as bad, if not worse, a relapse into the kind ofinternecine, interstate bloodletting that had so frequently been their lotsince the dawn of the Westphalian order in the mid-seventeenth century.However, beginning in the later years of the Bill Clinton administrationand escalating dramatically during the first administration of George W.Bush, it started to become an article of widespread conviction that oppo-sition globally, as well as in Europe, to what America did and even what itstood for had swollen to unprecedented proportions, with the obviousimplication that, unless abated, the rising tide of anti-Americanism wouldbe bound to have sinister implications for the United States and, presum-ably, for the entire West.76 Then, it seemed to be much more a questionof America’s getting its allies’ goats than of the reverse, for many wereinsisting that it was the anti-Americanism emanating from within theWest, rather than from outside it, that would prove to be of utmostconsequence as the Cold War receded from collective memory.77

Significantly, a great deal of this post–Cold War anti-Americanismcould be said to have been “structural” in nature and inspiration, fueledby a conviction that with the demise of the Soviet Union and the era ofbipolarity, the new era of “unipolarity” must prove an uncomfortable onefor the interests of the European allies. Of course, not all of the transat-lantic allies (or evenmost of them) regardedmatters quite in this light, butone prominent European state did, and its stance attracted to it, and toEurope in general, a great deal of attention. That state was France.We introduce the French case because it tells us much about the anti-Americanism of the Bill Clinton/GeorgeW. Bush years, and because it canbe expected to stand in contrast with whatever anti-Americanism might

75Harold Brown, as quoted in David G. Haglund, “Must NATO Fail? Theories, Myths, and PolicyDilemmas,” International Journal 50 (Autumn 1995): 651–674, at 651.76John Fonte, “Liberal Democracy and Transnational Progressivism: The Future of the Ideological CivilWar within the West,” Orbis 46 (Winter 2002): 2–14.77See, in particular, Christopher Coker, Twilight of the West (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); andRobert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).


stem from America’s being made to grate again on European sensibilitiesduring the Trump era.

The French critique of America during the first flush of unipolarity wasimportant not just because Paris seemed to be leading the charge againstWashington (it was doing this) but also because of the reasons why it didso. France might not have been the country in which this ideologicaldispensation we know of as anti-Americanism originated, but it certainlycan be argued to be the one place in the entire West where that dispensa-tion managed to attain its “most sophisticated intellectual expression.”78

This is in large part because in France, unlike elsewhere in WesternEurope, anti-American positions were staked out almost as much, andlikely more, on third-image bases than on either second- or first-imageones. This is an important point.

From the European perspective, those who fretted about life, first underClinton and much more so under Bush,79 analyzed their dilemma broadlyin one of two ostensibly similar, but in reality divergent, fashions. Therewere those, such as the Germans, who concentrated upon an Americathat was comporting itself poorly, in the sense that it was abandoningthe practice of “strategic restraint”80 that had served as the pillar of the“constitutional order” within which Germany and Europe had becomerestored to economic and moral legitimacy after the Second WorldWar.81 For those who regarded matters in this fashion, what was neededwas not so much a relatively weaker (that is, “balanced”) America asan America that was better behaved, one that understood that forgingcollective decisions on what was important (or not) served to advance bothits own interests and those of its allies. The logical implication of this(essentially a first-image) criticismwas that a solution to FFAA could easilybe found if America were simply to choose a leader more congenial to theallies than George W. Bush was considered to have been.

But there was another, contrasting, position, articulated most clearlyand most often by the French, and it accounts for the incipient structuralcritique of America that predated Bush and was on such vivid display

78Walter Russell Mead, “Why Do They Hate Us? Two Books Take Aim at French Anti-Americanism,”Foreign Affairs 82 (March/April 2003): 139–142, at 139.79For insight into the European mood prior to George W. Bush’s presidency, see Martin Walker, “WhatEuropeans Think of America,” World Policy Journal 17 (Summer 2000): 26–38.80There is a lengthy scholarly debate as to whether power can be “restrained” by its possessors in such a wayas to assuage allies (and possibly even potential adversaries). For a good summary of that debate, tingedwith skeptical overtones, see Tudor Onea, U.S. Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War: Restraint versusAssertiveness from George H. W Bush to Barack Obama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).81SeeG. John Ikenberry, “Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Persistence of American PostwarOrder,”International Security 23 (Winter 1998/1999): 43–78.


during the Kosovo War of 1999, a conflict that for a time looked more tohave pitted the United States against France than to have ranged eitherof these allies against Serbia.82 It was a position suffused with the convic-tion that “multipolarity” was a much more propitious structure of theinternational system than either of the two logical alternatives of bipolarityand unipolarity. No one manifested this structural (third-image) aspect ofFFAA better than Hubert V�edrine, who served as Lionel Jospin’s ministerof foreign affairs from 1997 to 2002. To V�edrine, what constituted the cruxof the problem for Paris was not so much American behavior (held to beepiphenomenal) but rather American power—power, that is, that wasrelative to others in the international system at a time when the historicaladversary of the Cold War era of bipolarity had ceased to exist. For theFrench, it was simply inconceivable that America could be enjoinedor expected to behave in a more satisfactory manner if the principaldeterminant of that behavior—its relative capability—was not somehow“balanced.” To his credit, V�edrine acknowledged that were Paris to possessas much power as Washington did, it probably would behave in a mannerjudged by allies to be even more insufferable than American behavior!83

It would, of course, be highly misleading to imagine that this structural,one could almost say “antiseptic,” variant of FFAA was the sole version onoffer in France.84 France, as elsewhere in Europe, also had critics ofAmerica whose targets were the latter’s perceived cultural and othersocietal foibles, defects that were as resistant to repair as any third-imagedemerits of the United States, as glimpsed by trepidatious Europeanpublics. But it was in France, much more than elsewhere in the Atlanticalliance, that third-image considerations played a central part in shapinggeostrategic cognition, and that did set it apart from the Europeanmainstream.

For what that mainstream really did not desire, certainly not during theColdWar and not even since 1991, was aweakenedAmerica, brought about

82For French critiques of America during the Clinton years, see in particular Jean Guisnel, Les Pires Amisdu monde: Les relations franco-am�ericaines �a la fin du XXe si�ecle (Paris: Stock, 1999); and CatherineDurandin, La France contre l’Am�erique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994).83Hubert V�edrine, Les Cartes de la France: �A l’heure de lamondialisation (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 50. It wasV�edrine who was credited with coining the very structural label for America as a “hyperpower.” Foranother structural critique, see Dominique David, “Pourquoi sommes-nous ‘anti-am�ericains’?,” �Etudes398 (January 2003): 9–20.84For comprehensive assessments (and criticisms) of French anti-Americanism, see Jean-FranScois Revel,L’Obsession anti-am�ericaine: Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses incons�equences (Paris: Plon, 2002);Philippe Roger, L’Ennemi am�ericain: G�en�ealogie de l’antiam�ericanisme franScais (Paris: Seuil, 2002);Pierre Rigoulot, L’Antiam�ericanisme: Critique d’un pret-�a-penser r�etrograde et chauvin (Paris: RobertLaffont, 2004); and Bernard-Henri L�evy, American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps ofTocqueville, trans. Charlotte Mandel (New York: Random House, 2006).


presumably by the mysterious qualities of something known as “softbalancing.” Instead, what the European mainstream desired was abetter-behaved America, something that seemed to have been deliveredby the American electorate in November 2008, when the very popularBarack Obama won theWhite House.85With Obama’s replacement by thevery unpopular Donald Trump, Europeans once more are beginning towonder about the reliability of their American ally, partly for familiarreasons but also for very unfamiliar ones. We have already witnessed anupsurge in anti-Trump emotionalism that could spread to revulsion, notjust of the president but to the country itself. This being said, there are alsosome important differences with respect to the FFAA that was witnessed inthe Clinton and Bush years (especially the latter), and they give us a hint astowhat wemay reasonably anticipate during a timewhenmanyEuropeanslook at Donald Trump and see Silvio Berlusconi.

CONCLUSIONSEuropean governments continue to place a high value on the Atlanticalliance, much higher than was the case during the recent bout of third-image FFAA, when a mood of optimism bordering on euphoria, if notdelusion, led some policy intellectuals (and a few policymakers) to imaginethat an era in which America had a reduced presence in European affairswas bound to be a pleasant era.86 Things are very different today, andoptimism is not a quality in abundant supply on the Old Continent. Thereasons for Europe’s current geopolitical funk are as apparent as they arenumerous. Russia has reemerged as a geostrategic menace for many,although not all, of the European Union member-states. The aftereffectsof the financial crisis of 2008 continue to be felt in a Europe with toomucheconomic divergence and too little currency flexibility, leading to acrimonyon the respective merits/demerits of austerity and budget balancing—acrimony sometimes couched in language both reflecting and exacerbatingcultural schisms between northern and southern Europeans. Britain isleaving the EU. The threat of “homegrown” terrorism continues unabatedand may be increasing. And for good measure, the migratory crisis

85For the rise and demise of European “soft balancing” against the United States, see Lorenzo Cladi andAndrea Locatelli, eds., International Relations Theory and European Security: We Thought We Knew(London: Routledge, 2016).86See, for this earlier sense of optimism regarding the EU’s prospects, JeremyRifkin,The EuropeanDream:How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (New York: Penguin, 2004);Mark Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century (London: Fourth Estate, 2005); and Charles A.Kupchan, The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-FirstCentury (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).


associated with, but not completely linked to, the Syrian civil war goes ondefying easy resolution, notwithstanding (or perhaps because of) thecurrent Band-Aid response worked out between the EU and an evermore rebarbative Turkey. Even if the risk of terrorism associated withmigratory flows can be grossly overstated, there remains the challengethat high levels of immigration can and do pose to “societal” (or whatsome term, “ontological”) security in important European countries—achallenge that has had a great deal to do with fueling the currententhusiasm in many parts of the Old Continent for populist politicalparties.

Most worrisome for Europeans is the thought that they might valueNATOmuch more highly than the United States does. There is certainly abasis for their worry, one that is rooted inwhatDonald Trump so often saidabout “freeloading” allies on the campaign trail. He, of course, is not thefirst president to remark upon the discrepancy between the relative sizeof the American budgetary contributions to collective defense and that ofthe country’s allies. In this respect, there is really nothing erraticor otherwise remarkable about his emphasis upon the merits of moreequitable “burden-sharing”: all of Trump’s predecessors from the timeof Dwight D. Eisenhower down to the present have sounded similarthemes. What really stimulates European fears, however, is the suspicionthat Donald Trump, being more like Silvio Berlusconi than any previouschief executive, might actually deliver on what he sometimes threatens todo and leave allies to their own devices. In a word, President Trump is seenas being a bit too quirky for the Europeans to count upon—one of thereasonswhy some inEurope have begun to imagine that theymight need toconfront a world in which America has cut them adrift.87 This is especiallyso for those Europeans who understand what it was like to live in a worldwhen “America First” was not just a campaign slogan but a foreign policydoctrine of a determinedly isolationist America.

Neatly capturing this radically altered European mood is a dispute thatarose over an editorial cartoon gracing the cover of the 4 February 2017edition of the popular German newsweekly Der Spiegel. Depicted wasPresident Trump, holding a sword in his left hand and the freshly severedhead of the Statue of Liberty in his right hand (the context here was thepresident’s initial attempt to “ban” immigration from seven predominantlyMuslim countries in the Middle East and Africa). Many in Germany andelsewhere questioned both the cartoonist’s taste and his editor’s judgment.

87Max Fisher, “FearingU.S.Withdrawal, Europe Considers Its OwnNuclear Deterrent,”NewYork Times, 7March 2017.


Just as many were convinced that, to the extent that a new era of FFAAloomed in the transatlantic world, it hadmuchmore to do with sentimentsof abandonment than with anything else. Noted the German tabloidBild, while Spiegel had developed for itself quite a reputation for beinganti-American during the years in which the Iraq War was inflamingpassions in the transatlantic world, “[t]hen it was often Americaninterventionism that Spiegel was criticising, while with Trump it is theend of interventionism that Spiegel is criticising.”88

No one can say whether we are likely to see come to pass any Americanabandonment of NATO; frankly, we doubt that it will. But that suchfears are now being expressed by otherwise sentient figures in transat-lantic security affairs is a testament to the current level of anxiety andmistrust regarding the president. American leadership still matters, agreat deal. The skills required to provide this may simply be far too muchfor a Berlusconi in the White House to muster. This is why we happen tobelieve that the negative consequences of the Trump presidency will beexperienced much more abroad than they will be in the United Statesitself.

The evidence to date on Trumpian presidential skills is, of course,partial, and what little there is of it is hardly encouraging for Atlanticists.Things may change for the better, once (or if) the new administrationgets a chance to find its footing. Or, if Eliot Cohen is to be believed,things might improve as a result of an impeachment or a resignation. Butfor the short term at least, it is hard to summon much enthusiasm for theprospect of continued American leadership of the West if Americareally is to be led by Silvio Berlusconi. Nor does it appear to us thatthe “counter-analogy” proffered by some Trump supporters mentionedpreviously89 supplies much in the way of comfort, because if there reallyis to be any substance in the “Jacksonian” motif, it would seem moreto invite comparisons with Michael Jackson than with Andrew. Forwhatever else America’s seventh president represented, it was decidedlynot a predilection to quirkiness.90

88As reported by the BBC, “Der Spiegel: Trump Beheading Cover Sparks Criticism,” 4 February 2017,accessed at http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38867961, 19 May 2017.89See n. 5 herein.90It could well be, as Walter Russell Mead claims, that Trump’s followers represent the resurgence of“Jacksonian” America in a sociological sense, but anyone familiar with the two presidents’ respectivebiographies would have difficulty findingmuch of a Jacksonian in the life and persona of Donald J. Trump.See Walter Russell Mead, “The Jacksonian Revolt: American Populism and the Liberal Order,” ForeignAffairs 96 (March/April 2017): 2–7. On Jackson, the best starting point is Jon Meacham, American Lion:Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York: Random House, 2008).


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The Journal of Public and International Affairs · Pavia (Italy) and visiting lecturer in International Relations and Tourism at the University of Italian Switzerland, in Lugano (Switzerland)